Watsan, founded by Chennai Founder Institute Graduate J Chandrasekaran, just won a Millennium Alliance Award in round 3 of their annual contest.
The purpose of the Millennium Alliance is to identify technologies that greatly impact the very large portion of society in India that lives in or near poverty. The aim is to implement these technologies and then, if they are successful and cost-efficient, to take these technologies and use them in other parts of the world that are still developing like Africa and South East Asia.
The focus of Watsan is water sanitation. Their primary goal as a company is to provide water and sanitary solutions to rural communities and urban slums. They do this by manufacturing and distributing cheap, effective, and most importantly electricity-free water filters to families and people who cannot afford other more expensive options. Water is essential to human life, and Watsan believes that everyone should be able to drink clean water. They have gained a prominent place in the rural market for their innovative products, starting with their water filter and continuing with their modular toilet. Watson has made quality drinking water and eco-friendly sanitation a reality for a number of people in rural India, and their efforts have not gone unnoticed.
Millennium Alliance awarded them a grant fund to continue doing their good work and hopefully spread it to other developing countries who need their products just as desperately as the rural community in India. What are they going to use the grant money for? Before we discuss that, let's get a basic understanding of how their water filters work. Watsan knows that the best way to filter and clean water is provided by our natural world. They take clay and sand and apply a good deal of heat to form them into a solid, but porous, candle. This is the crux of their innovation. The water is filtered through the candle made of clay and sand and comes out clean on the other side. You may be wondering how this is possible. The pores on the candle are smaller than the nano-sized bacterias and viruses that taint a lot of the water in India. The good clean water percolates through the filter and the pathogens, metals, waste materials, and other contaminants are stopped by the smaller than nano-sized pores. This technology has brought clean drinking water to over 16,000 in just a single year of operation.
So what is the grant money being used for? Currently, at the Watsan plant employees make these incredible filters by hand. They have the ability to make 150,000 of these candle filters annually. The grant money from the Millennium Alliance will be used to automate the Watsan plant. This will give them the ability to produce ten times the amount of filters that they can currently. The best part of this is that once the plant is automated the process of making water filters can be replicated anywhere else in the world, wherever the need arises. This innovation has the potential to do a lot of good not only in rural India, but globally. There are a number of other places in the world like Africa and South East Asia that have clean water issues and also have very large populations.
The Watsan filter has the potential to bring clean drinking water to the world. The thing that separates them from all of the other companies making water filters is that the Watsan is made of organic materials and does not require electricity, further extending the company's environmentally-friendly intentions.
